Topics /

Life, Learning & Writing

The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 615 posts.

2020
484

Talk Less, Listen More

I spent a whole bunch of time this fall and winter taking calls from young financial advisors. I try to schedule this stuff on Friday mornings when things are a little quieter for me. They DM me or email me and I just say yes. I have 15 minutes for any kid reading my stuff...

487

A Light Box in Heavy Times

My son is nearing his second birthday, which makes him nearly two years old. When he was only four months old I decided that I would make him something with buttons. I didn’t have much more of an idea than that, but I ordered one hundred illuminated buttons and started mulling what to do with them. Nothing much…

494

Would You Have Fallen for This Phone Scam?

You may have heard that today’s phone fraudsters like to use caller ID spoofing services to make their scam calls seem more believable. But you probably didn’t know that these fraudsters also can use caller ID spoofing to trick your bank into giving up information about recent transactions on your account — data that…

496

Don't Shave That Yak (2005)

The single best term I’ve learned this year. I want to give you the non-technical definition, and as is my wont, broaden it a bit. Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occur…

510

Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

We just had a huge shift from people eating out to eating in, and now a lot more people are baking, so we and a lot of people I know have had trouble finding grocery stores with flour in stock. The residential supply chain is struggling to keep up with demand. On the other hand, the commercial supply chain is…